The Brain: More Versatile Than You Knew
Your brain can grow new brain cells, and all you’ve got to do is try. The nitty gritty gets a bit more complicated.
If you’ve ever worked out, you know initially, a workout hurts. After a few days, the ache goes away, and if you’ve kept up with the exercise, you begin to notice a difference. You feel better, look better, and actually are better because you’ve developed muscles. But do those muscles remain?
Well, only if you keep them adequately satiated. You’ve got to keep working them out. But once you reach your physical “cruising altitude”, as it were, you don’t have to work quite as hard to maintain your physique as you did to attain it.
It’s the same with the brain. To maintain that which you’ve attained in the brain requires several weeks where you focus on establishing or excising a habit from your life. Once three weeks have been reached, and in some cases four, your brain will have established new neuropathways and built new neurons.
The difficulty at that point becomes maintaining the new change. Even if your brain rewires itself efficiently and effectively, you won’t be able to stop previous temptations and old memories from directing your decisions. One reason you don’t always retain a new skill even after three weeks is because you’re not disciplined in maintaining the change.
Thinking Critically
If you work out for a year and achieve your prime physique, then succumb to video games, potato chips, carbonated soda, inactivity, and general human vegetation, that physique will gradually ebb away until you return to your previous slovenly state; perhaps even degenerating further!
Why would you brain be any different? So what you want to do is carve out a habit, either as something you intend to keep, or something you intend to reject, and then maintain that change proactively until it becomes second nature. To that end, there are aids which can help you cognitively develop, and maintain that development.
Some of those aids come in the form of supplements engineered specifically for the brain. When choosing supplements, you want solutions as per this page, which provides among other things Alpha Brain, a: “…nootropic compound designed to increase your memory, enhance…focus, and improve your energy throughout the day.”
You’re going to want to couple your supplement ingestion with varying forms of physical activity which may or may not be related to those things you’re looking to either reduce from your life or encourage in your daily grind.
According to BrainProTips.com, things like sex and exercise increase neurogenesis, or the growth of new brain cells. The reason is simple: when the brain experiences new things in a pro-cognitive environment, it grows.
What Your New Regimen Looks Like
With these things in mind, here’s what a brain-positive regimen is going to look like. You’ll take your supplement at the right time as proscribed by those who’ve produced it, then you’ll do whatever activity you’ve decided to do. If you’re learning a new skill, study it ninety minutes a day if possible. If you’re quitting something, meditate on that for a while.
It’s not enough to say: “I’m not going to have a cigarette today.” You want to take a moment in a day to consider why you’re quitting, and that you will be tempted later in the day. When you’ve done this, as temptations come, they become less evocative. You’ll want to exercise and/or have a lot of sex as well; it will definitely help.
